First Brashear grads to revel in ‘ doomed’ experiment in integration
When Pittsburgh Public Schools opened Brashear High School in 1976, nobody thought it would go well.
The school district built the Beechview high school partially in response to a federal integration order and after it closed three other schools. Students came from five neighborhoods, and black students were bused for the first time over bridges and through tunnels to get their education, said Eugene Khorey, the school’s first principal.
Not even the Ku Klux Klan thought the school would work, so it didn’t show up, Mr. Khorey, 93, said, adding, “They predicted it would be the next Vietnam.”
But with the exception of a few incidents, all 2,400 students — half of them black, half of them
white — came together without much trouble.
“We had no help from anybody,” Mr. Khorey said, referring to the federal funds that assisted with the formation of the Woodland Hills School District around the same time. “The challenges were met by the student body that were determined to make it work, and they did.”
Students from the first classes to graduate from Brashear will gather for a reunion next weekend, a tradition they uphold every four or five years. More than 200 alumni of the school who graduated between 1977 and 1984 are expected to gather at the DoubleTree hotel in Monroeville on Saturday, said organizer David Thompson, a 1980 Brashear graduate.
“There was a lot of feelings going on back then,” Mr. Thompson, 57, of Wilkinsburg, said. “I’ve always thought of myself as the type of person that likes bringing people together.”
Mr. Thompson began organizing the occasional reunions after he moved back to the Pittsburgh area in 2007. He briefly considered not planning one this year, but after an old friend and classmate died suddenly several months ago, he wanted to bring everyone together again.
“I think it’s important to get people together in this climate and to make people realize that we can’t listen to these politicians and we still have to stay the course and make sure younger generations are thinking outside the box, and not just thinking politically,” he said.
Today, with about 1,100 students, Brashear is half the size it was when it opened. It has roughly the same number of white and black students, and it enrolls a large population of students from across the city who speak English as a second language.
While he was in high school, Mr. Thompson was among the students from the Hill District who were bused to the new school. He remembers a lot of media coverage surrounding its opening, plus some fights and general “turbulence,” especially among parents. The school was an “experiment that was doomed to failure from the inception,” Mr. Thompson said.
Everything calmed down when the football team started winning championships, he said.
“I think that winning championships helped us to realize we weren’t that dissimilar at all,” Mr. Thompson said. “We just came from different backgrounds, and sometimes it takes things like sports and music to realize that.”
“It’s a story that needs to be told, especially in the climate we’re living in today,” Mr. Khorey said.